I’m extremely excited and nervous for Friday. On Friday, I am going to be doing my first lesson in the classroom I’m observing. Normally, when I’m in the room, I sit with the kids when they’re writing, or reading Romeo and Juliet, explaining certain characters or scenes to them when I see looks of confusion on their faces. I have also gotten chances to read their work and comment on a couple of their essays, which was surprisingly a lot of fun. I have really enjoyed reading the student’s work, which makes me even more excited to present my lesson to them.

I have decided to do a collaborative short story and have the students focus on description. I really want them to see what too much, not enough, and just the right amount of description can do to a story. I’m going to be giving them a few short stories to look over and have them pick out what they feel is strong description along with what they feel is weak description, and explain why.

I’m really excited for this next part because I’m sure there’s going to be time for this. I’m going to break them up into groups of three and each student is going to take out their own piece of paper and for five minutes, they’re going to write an introduction to a short story, making sure to as much description as they can for an introduction. Then they are going to switch their papers with the people in the group, who will have 30 seconds to read the introduction, and then five minutes to write a body to their classmates story. After that five minutes is up, they’re going to switch again, have one minute to read the introduction and body of another story and for five minutes that student will write the conclusion.

I have never done anything like this before when I was teaching. I was stuck on and used to the rule that I had to have the students always write five paragraphs whenever they wrote. I’m extremely excited and extremely nervous because I don’t want to be bad in delivering the lesson to the kids and I’m doing it in front of my mentor teacher, so I don’t want her to think I’m not strong. This is a very big step because I also had to write a lesson plan, which is something I have never had to do before. A lot of people think that’s strange considering I taught before, but the school didn’t require lesson plans because the kids worked on computers a lot and then when it was time for direct instruction, we could choose what to do, and as long as the director knew what it was, there was no need for a lesson plan.

I just hope that I’m able to do a good job and be strong in my teaching. I’m sure the confidence when it comes to writing lesson plans will come when I’ve written more than one.

I want it to be a free for all activity so they don’t have the boundary of something specific, but if they can’t think of anything to write about for the introduction, I was going to let them do a spin on their favorite short story. What do you think?

I’d test the waters…if they seem to have trouble with just literature, maybe you could include films BASED in literature. They may not have read Pride and Prejudice, but they’ve seen the film with Kira Knightly, ya know?